By 10 a.m. o'clock on a Thursday morning, Courtroom A upstairs at Quincy District Court is standing room only.

Forty-seven cases are on the docket, and the room is crowded with lawyers and landlords demanding back rent – $4,391 in one case, $1,700 in another – and tenants who fear the worst: eviction.

This is housing court, and it is a far busier place than it was a decade ago. The number of eviction cases in Quincy District Court has gone up by more than 50 percent in the past decade, a symptom of what experts are calling a larger, more serious problem.

"We are in the worst affordable housing crisis that urban renters have ever seen in American history," said Matthew Desmond, a Harvard University sociology professor who researches causes and effects of eviction. "Eviction is one huge consequence of that."

The scenes at Quincy housing court are are being played out across the state. The Quincy court processed 1,482 eviction cases in 2012 and 1,392 cases last year, up from 972 cases in 2003. Plymouth County sheriffs helped evict 225 renter households last year, a 59 percent increase from the 141 eviction notices served a decade ago. In Norfolk County, sheriffs served eviction notices to 69 tenants in 2012, compared to with 49 a decade ago.

Desmond said that rents hit historic highs nationally in the past decade, just as many Americans watched their incomes either fall or flat-line during and after the Great Recession that began in 2008.

"The inability of federal policy to bridge that gap has created this crunch and a pressure, especially on low-income renters," he said.

Stakes in Quincy's and other housing courts are high, with renters and their families facing the trauma of eviction and the real possibility of joining the growing ranks of homeless in Massachusetts, who now number more than 19,000 people, according to a 2013 estimate by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Troy Lewis, a Brockton landlord who heads the Metro South Owners Association of landlords, said he owns 60 rental units and has to evict close to ten 10 percent of his tenants a year for nonpayment of rent.

"They want to use your money to buy their kids Christmas presents," he said of such tenants. "They get into rents they can't afford."

Between 2000 and 2011, median rents in Greater Boston rose by more than 47 percent, from $786 a month to $1,160, but the median annual income of renters grew by just 13 percent, according to a 2013 report from Northeastern University. Nearly all those gains in income were eaten away by inflation, the report added.

Statewide, only 6 percent of tenants in housing court have a lawyer, a disadvantage that housing advocates argue needs to be corrected, a Boston Bar Association report says.

"Tenants are woefully unaware of their rights," said Stefanie Balandis, a legal aid lawyer from Greater Boston Legal Services, who stood in the crowded hallway outside Quincy's housing court on a Thursday in January. "What's so sad and why so many families become homeless … is they sign agreements that give them really short periods of time in which to relocate without any real sense of just how brutal the rental market is."

Page 2 of 3 - On two recent Thursday mornings – when housing court takes place in Quincy District Court – more than 45 cases appeared on the docket. All but five landlords had lawyers, while fewer than four tenants had legal help.

What's behind Massachusetts' housing crisis?

Home foreclosures during the mortgage meltdown forced former homeowners into the rental market, along with tenants whose landlords lost apartment buildings to foreclosure.

Vacancy rates fell as demand went up, driving up fair-market rents.

The state and federal governments have failed to provide sufficient programs and funding for affordable rental housing, housing advocates say.

Subsidies that help low-income tenants stay in their apartments timed out because of limits in state funding.

Tenants lacking lawyers were encouraged by Judge Mark Coven to turn to two volunteer mediators or to Carolyn Sheppard, a social worker who heads up the housing program at Quincy Community Action Programs.

"I try to come up with some agreement so they can stay where they are," said Sheppard. She quickly sized up whether low-income tenants are eligible for up to $4,000 from a state program called Residential Assistance for Families in Transition, but they had to be in a narrow band of income.

A family of three cannot earn more than $37,800 a year but still has to earn enough to pay the rent after the benefit runs out.

"More and more people we're seeing are employed, but they're barely making it," Sheppard said.

Martin Monteiro of Randolph holds down two jobs, one as an athletic trainer and another shuttling rental cars at Logan Airport. He works seven days a week so he can clear the $1,200 a month for a one-bedroom apartment, about a third of his gross income.

"I work a ton of hours just to make the rent and other important expenses," said Monteiro, who has a teenage daughter, "but if an emergency comes up, it puts my back against the wall."

Landlords in eviction court run the gamut, Sheppard said.

"Some push the rents up to market rate so they can get as much as they can. Some say, 'I don't want to evict you but I have to pay the mortgage,' and some are heartless and cutthroat," she said. "But by and large, they're willing to talk to us and consider ways to keep the tenant."

From the bench, Judge Coven said he has tried to bring in support for tenants who are victims of domestic abuse or ones who have a physical or mental disability.

"The numbers are certainly going up," he said. "We've tried harder to bring in resources. …It's important to understand all the issues in a person's life when people could end up homeless. That's not in anyone's interest."

Page 3 of 3 - Chris Burrell may be reached at cburrell@ledger.com. Follow him on Twitter @Burrell_Ledger.